Michael Jones2013-05-24T23:33:56-04:00Michael Joneshttp://www.news.moviefone.com/author/index.php?author=michael-jonesCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Michael JonesGood old fashioned elbow grease.Django in Black and Whitetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.23707592013-01-02T13:18:53-05:002013-03-04T05:12:01-05:00Michael Joneshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-jones/Django Unchained is a nasty, brutish piece of work.
God knows what goes on in Quentin Tarantino's mind these days, but whatever ravings that too much success, too early, created it's a pity that there seems no muse he can turn to for editing. Inglorious Basterds was nasty and brutish as well, cruel, self-loathing, but HEY!, they were Nazis.
In Django, we have all of that (substituting slave owners for Nazis), along with a Goebbels quality racial screed designed to incite, not divert, nor amuse, or dare I say it: entertain.
As the movie progressed most of the audience sat increasingly nervous about what else they would be confronted with on the screen. What god awfulness would this age of anything goes allow: a living man being torn apart by dogs complete with surround sound? Check. Two black men forced to fight to the death in a whorehouse for the amusement of white men? Check. Not violence, or über violence, or a bit of ultra vi, but deliberate, lovingly filmed and scored savagery, Liveleak quality savagery complete with shrieks and cries and pleadings for mercy? Check.
All made hip and hipster-ish by Tarantino's grab bag of disconnected imagery from the movies of his youth. In this case his love affair with spaghetti westerns. Complete with announced shout outs for the cinematically illiterate in the opening credits. To persuade, perhaps, that something other than cultural and racial loathing is happening on the screen. The audience at my theater: all Americans at first, but then within 10 minutes the separation commenced: we were all either quavering descendents of slave owners or vengeful descendents of slaves.
The white actors in Django, deliberately selected by Tarantino, make the mountain family in Deliverance seem Ralph Lauren model-esque, Ivy League, well-dressed, bridge players. These actors play Einsatzgruppen in the movie: laughingly forcing slaves to be whipped, eaten by dogs, humiliated, raped, worked to death, forced to fight each other, locked in metal boxes for days in the heat, shackled, made to wear Grand Guignol face cages. The slaves, quite naturally given the movie's script, when given the chance, are depicted murdering all of the white people within gunshot or club range.
As the star of Django 'joked' about his role, "I get to kill all the white people."
Thinking about the movie, it is sort of a reverse Birth of a Nation in its racial caricatures.
The director, deliberately, or for ironic purposes, creates a disconcerting, Goebbels quality, racial divide and animus in the audience viewing Django. The whites in the theater, stunned by it all, sank into their seats and wondered whether their hipitude cards would be docked if they slunk out. Some of the African Americans actively engaged with the movie in a call and response, punctuated with riotous laughter and cheers, as the inventive violence against the white characters grew more violent.
Between the cringes, a semi revenge fantasy spun out before us amidst Quentin's bizarre surreal West Hollywood spaghetti western al Tarantino, with, of course, soundtrack and costume in jokes. Even a disgusting, given the circumstances, homage to a great American western: The Searchers.
His cultural loathing in the movie even extends to that most gentle of children's games: Candy Land.
The story: a slave wanting to rescue his wife from slavery. As noble a cause as can be imagined.
Indeed, Quentin makes reference to the Seigfried/Brunhilde German myth, using it as a double in-joke by allowing the SS killer from Basterds to explain the connection. And, according to IMDb, spelling the character's name, 'Broomhilda', you know: the cartoon witch. An indication as to the level of QT's wit these days and of the audience he hopes to delight with such drivel.
We live in such a strange time.
We have just endured a savage massacre at an elementary school.
Yet the trailers before Django were filled with guns and killings and close ups of bullets hitting movie flesh. Jarring, to say the least, with such real violence so fresh in our minds.
But, what's new? It's like Reacher, and even the new Bond movie, ratcheting violence up, to Balkan War quality savagery. In the Bond movie a beautiful young woman murdered, shot in the face with an 'assault' rifle. Why? To what end, as part of what story?
In Reacher, the movie begins with a lovingly crafted, specifically designed to shock, sniper murder of five (or was it six) human beings, again with an 'assault' rifle. The victims mostly women, with a child in the mix.
Why? To what end, as part of what story?
And, remember, Django and Reacher are Christmas movies, movies for the holidays. Perhaps this is Hollywood's attempt at irony? Or just common, every day, cultural loathing? Tin-eared bad taste, perhaps? Or, more likely: run of the mill cupidity.
We will move on from Newtown. We moved on from Beslan. A fresh tragedy will intrude. But, the images that Django puts into one's mind, the fact that major movie makers, backed by major studios, continue to make nihilistic gun porn and, in this case, racial porn, surely has to be part of the Newtown discussion.
At the end of Django, with all the white people shot to death or blown to pieces by a Hollywood quality IED, with Jamie Foxx's horse doing an end zone celebration in triumph, some of the African Americans in the audience cheered and clapped.
It was stunning.
Is this what Tarantino hoped to accomplish with Django?
How far below the surface, despite a newly re-elected African American President, despite a Civil War to free the slaves depicted in the movie, despite the monumental shift brought about by the civil rights movement, are the grapes of wrath stored in a Tarantino world?]]>It's Veterans Daytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.21135782012-11-11T15:18:34-05:002013-01-11T05:12:01-05:00Michael Joneshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-jones/
In The Great War and Modern Memory Paul Fussell, a combat veteran of WWII, reviewed literature and art created by the first world war and wrote of how the shock of millions being killed by high explosives and machine gun bullets affected how we think about the world even today.
In War he did the same for WWII. By then the lyricism of 'Flanders Fields' and the ironies found in comparing nature to the moon landscape of trench warfare were replaced in novels and poetry by descriptions of being a very small part of a gigantic machine that cared not for which way the poppies blew but concentrated on the efficiencies of killing and processing death on an industrial scale.
As in the poem below.
Our recent wars are more personal. Squads fighting against squads. The very specific violence of an IED. Small outposts in the middle of nowhere, as in Restrepo, with soldiers living medieval lives for months at a time.
There are thousands of young men and women walking amongst us who have gone through it all. One major difference between them and those who served in most of the last two century's wars: they are all volunteers. They may have read the poem below, stark and dispiriting, and went anyway.
Today we should remember and honor them all.
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner by Randall Jarrell
From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
"A ball turret was a Plexiglas sphere set into the belly of a B-17 or B-24, and inhabited by two .50 caliber machine-guns and one man, a short small man. When this gunner tracked with his machine guns a fighter attacking his bomber from below, he revolved with the turret; hunched upside-down in his little sphere, he looked like the fetus in the womb. The fighters which attacked him were armed with cannon firing explosive shells. The hose was a steam hose." -- Jarrell's note.]]>@aiwwtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.17865172012-08-16T13:35:19-04:002012-10-16T05:12:28-04:00Michael Joneshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-jones/Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, about his life is playing at my local theater and I saw it yesterday.
It is riveting, as is Ai Weiwei. A shambling Buddha-like figure of a man, he seems a bit of a charlatan when we first are introduced to his art but then becomes much more as we learn of his moral courage in fighting the state. 'The State.' It could be any of a number of states as most 'states' wish for utter control. Using ideology or religion to enforce compliance, to foster a sick moral suasion of conformity, enforced with violence as always, but, now, on a world stage made immediate by Twitter, Facebook, and viral videos.
The documentary shambles about a bit like its title character. Is he really a great artist or merely a great self-promoter? Do Western audiences flock to his shows because of his cause célèbre status or because his art says something universal? In Never Sorry, exhibition organizers gush in their normal silly manner, part ticket sellers, part of the great uber intelligentsia that decree a Campbell soup can on canvas is worth millions. We learn that Ai Weiwei doesn't really 'do' art any more but has assistants assemble things that others declare as 'art.' But, just as he slides toward caricature, the Sichuan earthquake happens in the middle of China. I remember reading about it, seeing a 5.30 news clip showing devastation and people numbly walking about, something about shoddy construction and pan caked schools, dead children, and then the news cycle moved on.
The Chinese government hoped for the same. It sealed off the area as only a totalitarian government can, downplayed the death toll and hoped things would indeed move on. And, perhaps that might have happened but for Ai Weiwei.
He brings his artist's sensitivity to Sichuan. He picks at the scab of political and international indifference to the tragedy. The world moves so quickly from suicide bombings to mass shootings to floods to earthquakes to fires... as in Stalin's famous observation: a few deaths are a tragedy, a million a statistic.
Not true, for Ai Weiwei and in the new world of social media.
In a country where the government can by decree, decree a one-child policy, the results of that policy became particularly cruel when a classroom was flattened in Sichuan. Every child killed by the earthquake killed a family. Each child represented the totality of the parent's future. Thousands of children were killed, and the government wanted them to be but a dismissible statistic, not a little pigtailed girl sitting proudly on a new bicycle, or an almost teenaged boy kicking a birthday soccer ball.
Never Sorry becomes a documentary within a documentary as Ai Weiwei and his followers drive to Sichuan and begin documenting the devastation. In the face of government disapproval and threats he and his team begin a new art project fueled by social media: They are going to name each one of the thousands of dead children on a website open to all.
An entire wall of his studio is taken up by the names of the dead. The dates devastate: 9 years old, 7 years old. He interviews the parents, the grandparents, he risks all for the truth.
Another visit, and he is assaulted by the police. Live on camera, the assault broadcast around the world through Facebook. Twittered in real-time.
Later, at an exhibition opening in Germany, he is rushed to the hospital, the blow to the head much more serious than thought. He puts the surgery, the stiches, the scar, his near death experience online. Millions follow it. Millions become aware of Ai Weiwei, his art, what the Chinese government is really all about, Sichuan, why so many are worried about increased government power, why America, it's Bill of Rights, it's rule of law, is so vitally important as an example to the world.
The activist Ai Weiwei becomes synonymous with the artist Ai Weiwei. He is the Vaclav Havel of China. The authorities don't know what to do about him. But, just as you begin to revere him, life intrudes: a son by another woman, callousness toward his wife and her pain.
No life is simple. No man or woman complete as in fiction. It's a messy, inchoate, beautiful, maddening, wonderment.
The director makes some great choices in presenting a snapshot of a life, but she also makes cloying choices. He plays with his child, but says nothing to the mother of that child. He plays with the media and the director sighs in admiration.
The viewer gives her a break; she is dealing with a fascinating man, living a fast-moving life despite his placid Buddha-like exterior. We find out that he lived for years in New York City. That his father was a famous poet, tortured by the Kuomintang in the '30s, beaten and humiliated by Mao in the '70s. He has a doting mother. A loyal wife. Devoted followers.
Then he is arrested by the authorities. Whisked away by a modern-day Gestapo. He disappears.
We wonder. The world wonders.
He is dropped off at his studio at night, weeks later. Seemingly cowed, head down, surrounded by the foreign press shouting questions as to what happened, would he still be a beacon of individual freedom in a country where individuals mean little?
He closes the door to the compound and is gone.
Then, later, @aiww begins Tweeting again.
It's a great documentary, a great story, a complicated portrait of courage, venality, talent, and personality.
A life.]]>Review: Act of Valortag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.13021632012-02-26T19:33:04-05:002012-04-27T05:12:01-04:00Michael Joneshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-jones/Ben-Hur, proving that even a re-mastering in HD, with a state of the art sound system, watched from leather seats in the Evanston Cineplex Theater 1, can't hide its late fifties treacle earnestness; and Star Wars Episode One -- The Phantom Menace shown in 3D, which is several Ds too many. A movie, that contains not even a fleeting phantom pleasure.
Ben-Hur's script is somewhat interesting as an example of the subversive fun gay writers had before Stonewall and The Boring Menace reminding one of how awful every Star Wars has been since Obi met Kenobi.
So today, with a great deal of trepidation, in total movie desperation, I went to see Act of Valor. For $12.50 in HD, in the new car smelling Theater 1 where Ben had won the chariot race the week before.
Drawn to the theater as much for fresh popped popcorn as the movie. Fully prepared to walk out half way through if it proved as bad as Time Out and others said it was.
But, it wasn't.
It's a terrific movie, maybe the best action movie of the last couple of years. You might have heard about how it was made: begun as some sort of recruitment documentary for the Navy SEALs program (although they have no shortage of volunteers for such an elite unit), changed into a commercial release using serving combat veterans not actors in a classic action thriller. With real weapons, real ammunition, and real SEALs. You know that they are the real deal immediately by the military professionalism shown on the big screen, a professionalism that actors can imitate but never do.
The story is a bit '24' ish, by way of Bourne and Blackhawk, but much more au fait and timely. It connects the terrorism dots with a clarity that most movies don't or fear to, naming names and leaving no doubt who we are fighting when we fight. The movie's script creates a more compelling, coherent, event driven story than many action films of the last few years. Valor races all over the world with a purpose and tells its story on land, sea, and air. It's a Field Manual on current weapons and tactics, a primer on the whys of acts of terrorism, and how SEAL teams and other units are prepared to protect America and Americans from such fanaticism.
The movie begins with a senseless act of terror which morphs into a sophisticated plot to smuggle suicide bombers into the United States through Mexico. We become one with the warriors as they are summoned to do what they have trained to do. We get to know them and their families. They become human in all too human ways: impending fatherhood, saying goodbyes, facing danger, facing death.
In this movie Americans don't negotiate or recommend sanctions, they act, and act with the kind of bravery displayed by every soldier in last year's excellent documentary Restrepo.
The characters in Act of Valor are reportedly played by on duty members of active SEAL teams. They certainly act like it. You can see it in how they hold their weapons, in how they move through jungle and desert; in how they sit in an airplane just before a HALO jump. Unlike any other war movie they even reload their weapons regularly. Watching them reload is like watching Baryshnikov executing a jete, they reload quickly, efficiently, with a competence borne of long practice under fire.
There is also the natural laconic manner with which they speak, the deprecating humor, the look... it all rings true.
As I watched I thought of the disastrous drinks I had with a good friend last year shortly after Restrepo inexplicably lost its well-deserved Oscar to the equivalent of a 60 Minutes investigation. Restrepo followed a platoon of American soldiers holding a godforsaken hill in godforsaken Afghanistan. A small firebase named after a beloved fellow soldier killed in action during the filming. The movie was riveting, sobering, maddening, sad, so sad, and so so real.
Unfortunately that was not what the West Hollywood swells, the uber in-crowd my friend is part of saw when they saw Restrepo. They preferred another movie, a much smaller movie for the Oscar. One that set up comfortable cartoon villains among Wall Street fat cats to pillory. A movie merely a political gotcha for the like minded.
Restrepo was something different. It was about those special men and women who run toward the sounds of gunfire, not away from it. About those who feel the profound emotion that is incorporated in the word, honor. About those who believe that there are things in life important enough to die for.
At drinks, Restrepo's soldiers were dismissed as the hopeless, illiterate poor condemned to the Army by circumstance. Dismissed because they smoked and had tattoos and because my friend's doughy, out of work, boyfriend was against the military. They had watched Restrepo's soldiers hardscrabble existence from the comfort of her expensive couch, in her expensive condo, on her expensive home entertainment center. The boyfriend sneering at men under fire, their bravery foreign to his life and threatening. His bravery limited to trying chef's specials, their dignity under rocket attacks, well, alien.
Sickened by such condescension, I asked if either of them had ever read Kipling?
A blank stare.
Thank goodness there were different people in the theater today. Forgiving of the occasional wooden acting by the SEAL Team members in static scenes (indeed they seem almost Charlton Heston-esque at times); forgiving of the Star Wars-ian awkwardness of some of the dialogue.
But, thrilled by the compelling, timely story. Amazed by the natural terse, funny, back and forth between the kind of men and women who put themselves in harm's way by choice. Fundamentally impressed by the SEAL teams and helicopter pilots commitment to duty, honor, country.
Made emotional by the realization that these were the actual people whose motivation, courage, and supreme expertise to accomplish their mission are out there even as I write this.
Valor has a very different feel to it than any other war or action movie you'll see. The way these men move in combat. The sheer technical mastery of modern war displayed. The competence. The camaraderie. By halfway through you are cheering when the bad guys are dispassionately dispatched and are clapping when the good guys win.
Act of Valor begins with a quote from a bomber pilot killed in action in WWII. It ends with a reading from a letter from the great Shawnee Chief Tecumseh. Both are memorable.
As I walked out, I recalled what a platoon sergeant said to me a long time ago about the difference in combat between an officer and a NCO. He had done three tours in Vietnam, he had a dangerous look about him, he had that inner steel.
Lieutenants, he said, give orders... I move men.
Toward the end of the movie, there's a scene that will stay with you: two of the SEALs discuss their latest mission. They turn and walk away from the camera. It's not just a walk... stage direction... exit walking away. It may have been scripted like that but it becomes something else.
As they walk they become larger than life. Professional, authoritative, a certain jauntiness. It's a walk that can only be walked knowing that you're the best in the world at what you do. A je ne sais quoi earned on battlefields around the world, in extreme conditions, a walk of confidence and utter competence.
You haven't seen that walk before in a movie. It's worth the price of admission.]]>Tinker Tailor Soldier Spytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.11576002011-12-19T11:46:41-05:002012-02-18T05:12:02-05:00Michael Joneshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-jones/Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. A tearing at the fabric of Western culture and values based on historical illiteracy and ideological hipness. You know, like typical network news anchors, showing their chops on the au courant issues of the day. Which was strange to find in a movie based on a book that celebrated what made England unique and good and worthy. Indeed there is a perverse web of propaganda spun throughout that ruins the movie.
It is as if the post Soviet Union John le Carré, the man who lost his muse with the breakup, rewrote the book to match his new disgust with it all, and Tinker has been tinkered with.
Most will know Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy from the wonderful book or the equally wonderful BBC series of 30 years ago. The book is in my top 10 and the series, starring Alec Guiness as Smiley, a masterpiece of Masterpiece Theater-dom.
I don't think there was another movie this year, based on cast and trailer, that I looked forward to with as much enthusiasm as I looked forward to this one. Alas, I must report, after seeing it this weekend, a betrayal as profound as the Circus' by its Soviet mole.
Tinker, the book, was a tale well told of gross betrayal. A story based on true events. A massive penetration at the very top of British intelligence costing countless lives that persisted until the '70s. A deep penetration, over many decades, that extended as far as our State Department and CIA as revealed in the Venona Files. A riveting story of betrayal, betrayal on many levels: between countries, between friends, between lovers, between a man and his wife. A dense, intelligent, sophisticated plot that described concentric circles of deceit, one bleeding into another, pebbles dropped into a still pool of trust causing ripples of violence that spread from Istanbul to London, from friend to friend, to a look between lovers discovering, as life teaches, that hearts rarely run true.
The new Tinker finds actors at the top of their craft betrayed by a director and scriptwriter with agendas beyond imaginatively making a great novel into a greater movie.
As Smiley is betrayed by Ann, by the Circus, by friends, by life, the movie is betrayed by a script that invents inexplicable scenes for incoherent reasons. A script that diminishes major characters, instead relying on moody meandering scenes signifying nothing. The ineptitude extends to a set designer's decision to substitute big airy office spaces and industrial lifts for the small clanking elevators and the cloistered clubby feel of the Circus' old building. A building that seemed to lean in on itself to protect its secrets. The set design makes it impossible to supply the aching intensity of document retrieval under watchful eyes as Smiley begins to unwind the mystery of 'Witchcraft.' There's little room for the delightfully arcane security procedures that added color to the words on a page. That entire precise atmosphere replaced with walkabouts in what looks like a well-lit newsroom.
Tinker was set during the height of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union's murderous ways were well-known, when the British Secret Service was a bulwark against Soviet expansionism and desire for global hegemony. In those days, even in the ambiguous world of spies and skullduggery, there were clear divisions between good and evil.
Jim Prideaux, played by the wonderful Mark Strong, an Englishman through and through, do the right thing and all of that, reduced in this script to a one-dimensional assassin and, perhaps, motivated by rejection by a male lover, rather than God and country.
Friendships between major characters, great men in the war, the betrayal between them at the heart of the plot, made even more acute by the intensity of the war against Hitler, diminished by fashionable modernisms. The default position of the screenwriters, seemingly to pound into the viewer a modern amoral moral equivalence, Western cupidity and decadence, even to the extent of making the noble heroism of the exhausted, cuckolded, George Smiley cartoonish and grey.
I was not surprised to find out on IMDb that one of them wrote Men Who Stare at Goats.
The writer and director elect to gut one of the great spy novels ever written for political, personally indulgent reasons. Peter Guilliam's dogged earnestness from the book now coupled with a completely invented irrelevant male lover's abandonment.
Why? To what end?
The wonderful detail of spycraft, the colorful language of the Circus, the different classes of agents: scalphunters, housekeepers, minders, described for the first time in Tinker almost entirely lost in the movie.
No one knew much of spycraft before the book, not many will know anything more about it after seeing this movie.
The original tight plot made the search for the mole as exciting an intellectual journey as literature or television can produce. In Alfredson's version that plot is reduced to dreary set pieces, mostly of Oldman's Smiley gazing mournfully out of rain spattered windows. The Tinker, the Tailor, the Soldier: complex, interesting characters all, indeed well played by great actors all, reduced to pawns occasionally called on to nod sagely in scene after scene. The wonderful sense of bureaucratic infighting, personality driven ambitions, ambiguous motivation, who is the mole, who the greatest betrayer of them all, lost amid invented subplots and a ponderous, inchoate script.
Then an invented jarring scene casually describing America's torture of Karla... no, not water boarding, but the even crueler pulling out of fingernails, because, you know, Americans are well known for torture.
A traditional West Hollywood shout out, I suppose, lest we forget Abu Ghraib, and the mythology of George Bush, Dick Cheney, and the neanderthal Neo-cons. As I said, let's ignore Stalin, Mao, and the KGB in an orgy of cultural self-loathing.
My memories of the end of the book are of an elegiac, sad, summing up, and a renewed commitment to fight the good fight against Soviet nihilism. Not so with the end of this movie: the mole uncovered, but understood amid fashionable moral equivalence and an absurd revenge fantasy worthy of a Death Wish movie.
Am I too harsh?
An example for lovers of the book and series: the wonderful set piece of exquisite spycraft involving the once lovely Connie, in her dreary Oxford bed sit. Smiley plying her with scotch, a key scene that sets the entire story going. Her lovely imagined affairs with her 'boys' punctuating the telling, the audience rapt, whether reading or watching on the telly, a single photo leading directly to the mole: is it the Tinker, the Tailor, the Soldier or even Smiley, done in passing. Dismissed. An afterthought. Dismissible. Well, that's in the can, on to more invented loathing of what Smiley represents, what England was.
After a while I sat in the dark increasingly disappointed by what was and was not happening on the screen, but, then realized that more than disappointment, the primary reaction to Tinker was unthinkable given the source material: boredom.
]]>Baseball: A Love Storytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.11034692011-11-21T17:08:32-05:002012-01-21T05:12:01-05:00Michael Joneshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-jones/
FM stations playing automated hits from the '90s or country songs about trains and pain, over to AM, and the classic highly compressed distorted crackle of the media of my youth. Music there and then gone, old-time preachers thundering about sin and resurrection, deep voiced Spanish DJs introducing music evoking emotional heat and the Sierra Madre.
Then, clear and strong, the sixth inning of a World Series game. The color guy and play-by-play announcer painting pictures with their voices, a broadcasting style unchanged for generations.
I thought of other Americans clustered around radios hearing: "two outs, left-handed batter up next, a fast runner at first, the pitcher nearing a hundred pitches... they've got a right hander and left hander warming up in the bullpen."
The laconic descriptions making me feel like I was at the ballpark. The crowd roared when the reliever's first pitch was hammered for a double and the runner on first slid under the tag for the first run of the game.
It all took me back to sneaking radios into class when World Series games were played during the daytime. To playing in a Little League All Star game when we lived in Japan at a big league baseball stadium. The fences so far away that a hard grounder could turn into a homerun.
To becoming a father, raising a son and daughter, teaching them to catch and throw and hit. My daughter, a darn good player until ballet took her from the diamond to the stage.
My son, born with a linebacker's body: broad-shouldered, muscular legs, definition in his arms even as he took his first breath, stayed with it. He was a born hitter. At three, in the living room of our apartment, after I showed him how to hold a little yellow plastic bat, put him in a batting stance and lofted his first wiffleball pitch, he smoked it straight back at me, hitting me hard in the groin. I collapsed in agony, laughing and crying at the same time. When I looked to see his reaction to his dad writhing on the floor, he had no reaction; he was back in his stance, waiting for the next pitch.
After we moved to Evanston a neighbor of ours with a son the same age and I began another rite of Americana: coaching Little League. I must say that it was one of the most gratifying experiences of my life. Evanston's start-up leagues were co-ed, Evanston's community a United Nations of cultures. We taught baseball, American baseball, to children from all over the world, but especially, it seemed at that time, to children escaping the fresh hell of the Balkan Wars.
They had little English, their parents none, but all were desperate to be Americans, to be part of the America that they had heard of or seen in movies. Most of the parents worked several jobs but would come to as many games and practices as possible. Older children or relatives would translate after practice: we'd answer endless questions about double plays and the infield fly rule, or how to break in a baseball glove. The parents would ask us to teach them which hand to catch with and which hand did you use to throw a baseball. They wanted to be American parents and play catch with their kids after work.
You would catch comments of lives turned upside down in an afternoon, of ethnic cleansing and refugee camps. But, now they had been welcomed into the United States of America and Bosnians, Croats, and Serbians were Americans, cheering together when any of the kids did well.
As the World Series game droned in the background, I thought of the magical season when we won the Evanston Little League championship.
It was an all boy league by that age. The boys 10 or 11, some already showing greatness, some showing a love of the game, but no skill in a way that would bring tears to your eyes because of their determination. We evolved a policy of playing everyone, in every position, in a rotation. That is, every position but pitcher.
The pressure of pitching was just too much for most kids at that age. Having to throw strikes, the ignominy of walking batter after batter until one the coaches came to take them out of the game, was not for the fainthearted nor weak armed. Rotating the other positions was a commitment we made because we knew that in just a few years many of these players would experience the first of life's many injustices: they would play or sit from Pony League on based on parental/coaching politics rather than ability.
We were determined to teach them the game and to give them the best experience possible as they played baseball on our team.
The season became memorable in the fifth game. My son, Ethan, had grown into a really good baseball player and a great hitter. He was, by far, the best hitter in the league. With power to all fields, a great eye, able to smoke the ball just as he could at three.
This year, on another team, there was a pitching phenom. A kid, not yet 12, already shaving, six feet tall, a lanky strong build, and a small college quality fastball. In two starts he had struck out or hit every batter he had faced.
As we unloaded the bats and helmets from the trunk of Mark's car we could hear the whack of a ball hitting glove as the kid warmed up from a football field away. There were a hundred spectators in the stands and along the fences to watch the best pitcher face the best hitter in the Evanston Little League. We usually had 20.
Ethan batted cleanup (as I write this I remember trying to explain the concept of a 'cleanup' hitter to the father of a Serbian girl after practice one day). We led off. Our first three hitters struck out, but I was so proud of them: not one flinched and one actually tried to bunt his way on.
The other team went down in order.
Top of the second and Ethan settled in to the batter's box. The crowd, the players, the coaches, the umps all took a collective breath and leaned in to watch the timeless tableau of pitcher, batter, catcher. "Play ball," cried the ump. The languorous, almost Bob Gibson like wind up... fastball... high, ball one.
Ethan stepped away, looked over to Mark and I, and winked.
Fastball, high again, ball, but the sizzle of the ball in the air and the solid sound it made hitting the catcher's mitt was impressive. The force of the pitch literally caused the catcher to recoil back just from the pure physics of it all.
The kid stepped off the mound. He knew who he was facing. Back up, toeing the rubber, the same professional looking windup, the pitch, the fastest fastball any of us had ever experienced in a little league game.
Ethan pulled it twenty feet foul down the third base line. A laser beam line drive of exquisite kinetic energy that was off his bat and gone before we heard the crack of ball on bat. Everyone blinked. What had we just seen?
The pitcher looked at his coach, clearly rattled, nothing like this had ever happened to him in his short baseball career. Someone had 'pulled' his fastball as if it were an underhanded toss of a tennis ball.
Windup. Pitch. A fastball, humming with the sound of a Hatori Hanzo blade, right down the center of the plate. Ethan turned on it and slightly pulled it foul, but this time a towering high drive that would have cleared Waveland Avenue had it been smote at Wrigley Field.
The kid was shattered. Two pitches in the dirt, a walk, two hit batsmen, another walk, Ethan in for a run and the coach pulled him. We won 5-1.
On the last day of the season, in the last half of the last inning of the championship game, Eric Kerasa, a player who loved baseball, was at his normal rotation at third base. Third base is a key position in little league, usually manned by one of the top players on any of the other teams.
Eric was a marginal baseball talent but a wonderful, enthusiastic player. We were ahead by one, runners on second and third, two away, one out away from winning our first championship. Parents whispered to us through the fence: "Can't you switch Bobby to third or even Jason? Come on, it's the championship game! Eric's not good enough. You have to make a change."
No.
The next batter slapped a high hopper, tough play, right down the line, both runners off with the pitch. Even if Eric could somehow knock the ball down his only play would be a long throw to first. Relying completely on instinct, Eric threw himself toward the crazily bouncing ball, glove down like we taught him, at full stretch, the ball whapping solidly into his mitt. The momentum of the dive left him sitting on the ground behind third base. With the practiced ease of Brooks Robinson, he transferred the ball from glove to throwing hand and fired a strike to first, the runner out by an eyelash.
Pandemonium, cheering in several languages, Eric the MVP of the championship game.
His life changed at that instant. For years after, Eric's dad would stop me on the street to tell me how much allowing Eric to play third in such a critical moment meant to the entire family.
The World Series is in the seventh inning stretch, I tried to explain that term once to a mother newly arrived from Ireland, the speedometer stays on 80, and I remember the look on our players' faces that day:
They had won.
]]>The Ides of March Reviewtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.10017042011-10-10T12:04:54-04:002011-12-10T05:12:02-05:00Michael Joneshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-jones/The Ides of March: Philip Seymour Hoffman as the campaign manager for a candidate in the Democratic Primary for president. The rest is sort of an MSNBC/Jersey Shore political cartoon. George Clooney's ego trip of superficial insights into politics from a Hollywood star who has been to a few conventions, appeared before a Congressional committee or two, and probably has had his ass kissed by prominent politicians dropping 'off the record nuggets' on the 'process.' More so after they heard he was doing a movie about campaign politics in hopes, no doubt, of convincing him to allow the use of his voice for robocalls.
For a while I was hopeful that the movie's plot would explain how Ryan Gosling wound up becoming a getaway driver in LA, but such hopes were dashed by the improbable twists of an improbable plot that relies on more small 'd' drama than the soap operas that gave Clooney his start.
And, one supposes, much of his inspiration for the non-political side of The Ides of March.
Sure, there are some political insights here, but nothing more than you'd find in an hour of Hardball. Indeed, Mr. Matthews and other commentators make appearances in the flesh or voice to add immediacy to the movie. Irony abounds in that most of what they do for real or in the movie has a sense of equally false drama: melodramatic truth as quasi fiction for ratings.
I, personally, get all my news from The Onion.
But, an air of reality hangs about the movie in the depiction of how frenetic campaigns are and how ugly political sausage making really is. The cynicism behind the speechifying, familiar since Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, is there. So are, the loss of political innocence, deal-making, lying with a smile, moral corruption. Yes it's all there, but, also, and ruinously, a Peyton Place moral center.
You know: fallen women and the men who made them fall. Virtue surrendered and its draconian penalties. Made 21st century-ish with shout-outs to Bill and Monica, who have become a useful cultural joke, boilerplate Republican stupidity, Democratic sensitivity, and secular righteousness about religion.
George plays Clooney and is never believable as governor, candidate, husband, or feet of clay-er. Paul Giamatti plays the opposing campaign manager and gives Mr. Hoffman a run for the acting chops money. Marisa Tomei is a powerful NYT reporter but, alas, breaks her magnificent string of consecutive movie appearances in the nude. Ryan Gosling, a modern Jack Burden (All the King's Men... the book, not the movie), wanders through the plot's labyrinth ruining the great impression he made on me in Drive. As an actor, he has implacable down. Nothing moves on his face except eyes and eyebrows. His mouth remains a perfect straight line throughout The Ides of March, not a sneer nor snarl disrupt its perfection.
It flatlines amid all the political Sturm und Drang.
Evan Rachel Wood is the anvil upon which the plot is pounded. She proves that the Republicans have already won by being unable to find a Planned Parenthood clinic in all of Cincinnati. She's a helpless waif, or a ravening harlot, or a clueless twenty-year-old with Daddy problems, or maybe the religious nutter rhythm method Catholic found, I guess, in all movies these days. What?!! There haven't been religious nutter rhythm methoders populating movies these days? What? Twenty-somethings don't use the rhythm method? What?!! Twenty-something women can be sexually active by choice and aren't fallen women? What?!! Twenty-something women know about abortions and ATMs?
Who knew?
By midpoint the movie became grating, not because of the politics espoused, its politics meander just enough to appeal to most. It's grating because at least three of the four cylinders of the engine that drives it make no sense. A secret meeting in a bar that wouldn't interest Michael Sneed, much less the New York Times, stumbles things off. Hot sex among the hyperkinetic young staff, checking Blackberries between thrust and response, is old hat these days and wouldn't raise an eyebrow. Same with sex by a candidate with anything other than a dead goose. Politicians sacrificing ideals for votes? Well, quelle surprise. By the end, the suicide of a sympathetic character to merely move the pawns around seemed extreme and just sad. Overkill. By then you didn't really care who would win the primary or why.
I once worked on a campaign for big stakes in a big state. The issues were compelling, the candidates clearly defined, the campaign workers living movie-esque high/low lives, the press cynical, devious, easily manipulated and aggressive, and the result the stuff that movies are made of.
Hey! Maybe I should write a script about it all: there was even a Bill Clinton appearance... in all his primal glory, so to speak.
I wonder if he would agree to play himself?
]]>The Guardtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9202872011-08-09T13:44:23-04:002011-10-09T05:12:01-04:00Michael Joneshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-jones/The Guard.
It's been a while since I have enjoyed a movie so. I could reach for a comparison that would be too too and write "I haven't enjoyed a movie as much since the last time I saw Gumshoe," but then I'd get into a raucous argument in some dark bar over who's a better actor: Brendan Gleeson or Albert Finney. A discussion which would soon evolve into tawdry tales of trips to Ireland, or, of how many times one has seen The Quiet Man. Depending on how literary the crowd, and in honor of the Galway setting of The Guard, I'd try to steer my bon copains to Ken Bruen and Irish detective fiction.
I'd tell my story of meeting Albert Finney, both of us a bit worse for drink, one summer's afternoon in Covent Garden. He nodded a friendly hello as I walked by. I stopped, took off my Ray-Bans and dead-panned from Gumshoe:
"Haven't had these off since Buddy Holly died."
He laughed the laugh from the dinner scene in Tom Jones, took a long pull from his pint, and replied:
"Well, that's two of us that saw it anyway!"
Holding forth in bars over a pint or two with strangers and friends discussing movies, books, and Albert Finney are what make life a wonderment.
In The Guard, Brendan Gleeson plays Gerry Boyle, a crusty, intellectually subversive member of Galway's finest. He's a Garda, an Irish cop, and, is as comfortable in the skin of Sergeant Boyle as any movie character I've encountered in a long time. His Boyle reminds us that really great actors seem not to act at all... they just are.
The movie opens with a bit of police work that won't be found in manuals, kicking off a tale that unfolds with humor, humanity, and vivid characterizations. A wonderful screenplay with so many gruff asides in almost impenetrable Irish accents that you have to pay attention. Dialogue so vivid, so expressive, as to make even a modern-day movie audience forget texting and chewing popcorn open-mouthed for a while.
Bad guys are bringing in a half billion in drugs and the FBI sends an agent to the West of Ireland as liaison with the locals to help track the shipment and apprehend the miscreants. The G-man (government not Galway) is the wonderful Don Cheadle, an actor I have liked in every role he's ever been in. He and the curmudgeonly Gerry Boyle create a new take on the traditional cop buddy movie. There's nary a hint of the treacle that ruined In the Heat of the Night between them. In this movie the sophisticated big city black cop and slow, rural white cop interact naturally, as humans not symbols. Their back and forth is fresh, funny, and contains more than a bit of blarney.
The FBI/Garda dynamic also allows the screenplay to skewer America with barbs worthy of In the Loop. There aren't really belly laughs in The Guard, but chuckles and grins as you admire the word play and Irish sensibility of almost every scene. Gleeson never overplays his character, never turns Gerry Boyle into a cartoon Irishman from the Barry Fitzgerald school of overacting. A few scenes in, you believe that Sergeant Boyle exists and know that out there, whether in Connemara, Boston, New York or Chicago, there are big, subversive, Irish cops just like him. Cops whose faces are, like Brendan Gleeson's, road maps of toughness, wit, porter, and, somewhere, a gentleness.
Sergeant Boyle and his ilk, are the kinds of cops honest citizens admire and knuckleheads fear.
The supporting cast is excellent: Mark Strong leads a trio of bad guys who quote philosophers, murder as casually as they floss their teeth, and while evil, are evil with style.
Don Cheadle's FBI agent plays more as a foil for Sergeant Boyle's wit and wisdom than as a costar. But, Cheadle's innate dignity as an actor and wry expression in the face of the pure Irishness around him, make his character immensely likable.
The writer/director, John Michael McDonagh, is the brother of Martin McDonagh, the writer/director of In Bruges. Discovering this connection on IMDb made me flip a mental coin to decide which movie was better written, had more comic asides, or balanced thriller and humanity so well.
After twenty mental flips and flops, The Guard came out just ahead.
The deck was stacked anyway. The Guard is set in the home country, has several scenes with the most fun ladies of easy virtue since the girls Alex met at the Milkbar in Clockwork Orange, and is funnier.
In Bruges: no such ladies, and, well, Belgium?
When it ended, the audience just sat there, silent for a moment, content. No dashes for the exits for this crowd, everyone waiting until the end of the credits. Engaged and happy until the the very last actor's name and character in the movie was shown. Only then, after the screen turned black, was there an immediate excited buzz as people exchanged remembered dialogue and declared that everyone they knew had to see The Guard forthwith.
It's great fun, interesting, sardonic, with Ireland's terrible beauty on full display. I sat in the dark and hoped that I'd run into Brendan Gleeson in a Covent Garden pub one day as I did with Albert Finney. I'll buy him a pint and talk about Gumshoe, Ken Bruen's Garda hero, and wait to hear if he says anything about Buddy Holly when I ask him to take off his sunglasses.
]]>Cowboys and Alienstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9141132011-08-01T14:32:50-04:002011-10-01T05:12:01-04:00Michael Joneshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-jones/Cowboys and Aliens has against Daniel Craig's forehead, or, his eyebrows? But, then again, I wonder what the director has against coherence, soap, Westerns, American movies, Apache Indians, aliens, or Vice President Biden?
We all know and acknowledge that Joe Biden is the most Onion-friendly politician of our lifetime and possesses the most dazzling smile on the planet. A foot of new snow on Ajax, pure white in the Aspen sunlight, is sooty slush compared to Joe's improbable chompers. At his public appearances aides hand out sunglasses lest eye damage result when he goes beyond a grin to display the work of teams of BriteSmile technicians. Of all the CGI wizardry on display from the boffins who made C&A nothing dazzles more than Olivia Wilde's beyond-Bidenean teeth. Yes, more dazzling than the alien hand thingies that spring from their Alien-shout-out chests. More dazzling than the creepy upside-down riverboat with water cascading from above waiting for Harry Dean Stanton to call 'Jonesy' Alien shout out... part deux.
Her whiter-than-white teeth caused Biden boosters in the theater to recoil in horror at this blot on Joe's enamel escutcheon. "We thought Hollywood was our friend," they moaned... "first Atlas Shrugged, and now this?" they keened.
Almost as miraculous are the whites of Olivia Wilde's eyes in the same scene. Had the British soldiers' eyes been that white before Bunker Hill, the American colonists could have begun firing as they left Fenway Park.
Cowboys and Aliens is a mess on so many levels: improbable casting, ridiculous wardrobe choices, plot (see below), rampant kumbaya-ism, lame homages, and a screenplay only a screenwriter's mother could like.
James Bond, the normally interesting Daniel Craig, assumes the classic The Man with No Name role as The Man with No Memory/Forehead/Eyebrows/Razor with little success. His Western star turn is not helped by the decision to place a cowboy hat on his cabeza that is pulled so low that any close up consists of chin, cheeks, eyes and hat. That's it.
All the better, perhaps, to concentrate on his smoldering blue eyes, which do smolder, but only intermittently. A known beefcake, he drew multi-gender gasps as he stalked away from the camera in revealing Village-People-era leather chaps. The PG-13 rating ensures cloth between buttock and audience but, some in the audience hope, no doubt, for a Director's 'cut.'
As my friend Mark Doyle is apt to say, recounting an episode from his Clinton years, a, uh, sidebar:
The Plot: a super alien race, living in a galaxy far far away, has reacted to G. Gordon Liddy's Buy Gold! commercials and sent an expedition to corner the market. I guess there's an intergalactic recession going on as well, with the Uni-Euro is as rocky as the dollar. They get their ETA mixed up with all the light years involved and miss our drop-dead debt date and new gold future highs by a hundred and forty years. It being 1870 or so, rather than having to deal alien a mano with G. Gordon, they're faced with Cowboys and Indians and a lovable pooch. C&A's aliens have no death beams or ray guns, but use weird hi-tech lariats and sharp claws as weapons while dabbling in the ho-hum anal probing of human captives all aliens seem so fixated on.
Between victims being hoisted spaceward in reverse bungee jumps, weird optics suggesting repressed memories, father-son issues, white-Indian issues, Antietam, and a gift knife that LOOMS LARGE, the plot thickens into thin gruel.
C&A reminds that there are two kinds of Westerns: clean and dirty. Classic westerns are clean: a bit of grime and dust but the actors and landscapes are not defined by the lack of Motel 6s and shampoo: think Shane and the Coen Bros. True Grit (the title defines what I'm referring to). And, then movies like C&A and anything by Sergio Leone: the Old West's cleanliness problems triumphant. Dust, dirt and sweat stained shirts and hats.
Thank goodness my tickets were not for Odorama version playing in the theater next door, but I caught a whiff of prairie dog as I walked past.
Even in the movie's first moments, Daniel Craig makes Pig Pen, from the classic Peanuts comic strips, seem positively Giorgio Armani-ish in comparison. He only lacks the constant trail of dust that is Pig Pen's signature look. There's also a bandit gang in the movie who seem to have wandered over from the set of Blood Meridian. To a man, they are all grimly grimy, stringy filthy hair on their heads and drooping from the bloody, flyblown scalps tied to their saddles, matted beards, funny hats and all. Which is another key differentiator in Westerns: funny looking hats. Classic Westerns: Stetsons and Cavalry hats. C&A and new wave westerns, hatters from hell: stove pipes, floppy shapeless somethings, and, on Daniel Craig: anti-forehead wear.
I know there are lots of exceptions to classical Westerns/classical hattery rule, but, I'm on a roll here... don't get me started on the universal rule of Great Westerns/how pistols are worn.
There is another major star of the movie: our beloved Jack Ryan, Indiana Jones, Dr. Richard Kimble, Han Solo... none other than the now-uber-grizzled Harrison Ford. I should note that all the male characters, with the exception of the Apaches, are grizzled. I think I noticed fashionable two-dayers even on the aliens. Prepare yourself ladies, if you take your significant other, especially if he sports a de rigueur chic almost-beard, to C&A, you are giving free license to a major escalation in general scruffiness.
But, I digress.
Mr. Ford gives us his four well-loved facial expressions throughout the movie, usually all four within the time period of a NBA shot clock. The only missing Fordian set piece is his famous leap from an explosion with one hand in front of his face and his familiar open-mouthed rictus. Other than that, Harrison-philes can check off his acting oeuvre: surprise, smirk, fury, glower, and repeat.
Except at the very end of C&A, when a cleaned-up Ford, in semiformal cowboy wear (a shout out to my friend Roger Ebert) complete with oddly banded cowboy hat, positively beams as he tries to take Daniel Craig's hat off to uncover his rumored forehead and eyebrows and is shot dead by Deadly Dan for his temerity.
No, not really.
But, such a conclusion might have made this movie more interesting. In C&A, teams of screenwriters, obviously working in isolation from each other (there's a cut-and-paste vibe to the run of the scenes), funded to the tune of our national debt, with a mandate that sweat and grime suggests verisimilitude, trying to convince us that Apache lances are weapons grade technology against alien hordes, offer us two hours of foreheadless dreck.
No Oscars for this one, but, I predict Vice President Biden will ask that Olivia's teeth be darkened for the DVD release. I will further predict that young women, repulsed by the grizzle, will embrace tradition, and demand a clean shave before dancing cheek to cheek with their inamoratos. And, last but not least, I predict that Daniel Craig will be riding a Maserati rather than a mare when next we see him, forehead, eyebrows and all up on the big screen.
]]>Bride Flight Reviewtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8900052011-07-05T18:27:56-04:002011-09-04T05:12:01-04:00Michael Joneshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-jones/Casablanca and with two of the most fecund female characters since the Catholic League's Sex Education tapes warning against the dangers of premarital sex.
It's loosely based on a historic event: an airplane race from London to New Zealand in 1953. The Dutch entrant also delivering war brides from shattered Holland to barely known grooms who had already made the trek to a new life. Photographer's flash bulbs pop and reporters shout questions to the young women as they board, the plane's engines roar, and we all buckle in for a movie that has quite a story to tell.
Even before the stewardesses offer the passengers drinks and snacks we have time-traveled several times: young lovers fall in love; a man dies; dreams are shared; the young become old, and with the magic of movies, are young again. Heartbreak, birth and death, steamy sex scenes, family secrets, Japanese atrocities in the Dutch East Indies, religious zealotry, friendships broken (did I mention steamy sex scenes?), all march across the the screen. Bride Flight shows the best and worst of our celluloid heroines as nobility and venality play their usual roles.
It's a very human story.
Making the melodrama profound is the reality of what happened to young men and women like these fictional characters: the reality of what Holland experienced in World War II. Over 200,000 Dutch men, women, and children died during the war. 75% of Holland's Jewish population was murdered. It was one of the last countries in Europe to be liberated from the Nazis. During the Hongerwinter of 1944-45, when the war was virtually over, more than 18,000 starved to death in a few short months. I have an older Dutch friend, in his early teens then, who suffered through it all. He told me of the Allied planes in Operation Manna that appeared one day and dropped food from the sky. It was a miracle, and he has never forgotten it. Indeed I think his incredible joie de vivre, his humor and love of music, his easy manner all stem from the irony of his survival. Or the woman from Amsterdam I met years ago in Las Vegas, brilliant and uber chic, getting tears in her eyes telling the stories she had heard of relatives greeting young American paratroopers, so healthy and strong, so devil may care, as they liberated towns during Operation Market Garden. But, only a few days of freedom as we saw in Band of Brothers. Her aunts and uncles, the joyous people who celebrated a moment of freedom, condemned to savage reprisals and months more of occupation when the Americans were driven back by German counterattacks.
That history, gives Bride Flight a depth beyond its melodrama. If there had been no war these women would have followed a traditional path to life, to marriage, to motherhood. But, no, such lives were not to be. There was nothing for them at home, so they were forced by fate to seek happiness a world away. Chance meetings on a plane create the plot; choices made in moments impact all that follows. Fictional characters mirroring our own choices and improbable lives: a succession of what ifs.
I have read a number of dismissive reviews of Bride Flight. Sappy, sentimental, improbable, a soufflé not a steak, they write. But those critics give no weight to the historical context motivating the characters. Those critics, wearing their hipitude on their sleeves, thinking cold is cool, moved by technique not emotion, no doubt hating Bambi to show solidarity with PETA, are but outcast men. As in the best books and movies, as in Bride Flight, the fundamental things apply: love, love lost, love unrequited, children, the quest for happiness, war and death, mistakes magnified by the passing years, women and men, but, in this movie, mostly women and the choices forced upon them by society and circumstance.
There are several set pieces in the film, underlined with overly dramatic music, disclosing why some things are what they are. The young Jewish woman, profoundly affected by her improbable survival, tries to be hard but is, as we all are, flesh and blood. She tries to say goodbye to all that, but to quote another: the body moves on, the mind circles the past.
The handsome young man, so full of life and good humor, cocksure in more than the traditional definition, the center of much of the story, carries the war in his shirt pocket as he creates a new life in a bright new country that takes in damaged goods and makes damaged lives whole.
It is, as I say, an old school movie.
I tried to remember other Dutch films I have seen and realized that they are all about the war: Soldier of Orange, Black Book, and now Bride Flight. It would seem that beyond the gaiety of Amsterdam with its brown bars, hash bars and cold Heinekens, the young and old remember. They remember Ann Frank. They are the grandchildren and great grandchildren of those who lived through times unimaginable, but imagined in Bride Flight. Indeed imagined by the audience at the Music Box on a Saturday afternoon. The movie making us feel for a mother who gave up her child, for a woman who married but loves another, for a man who spent his childhood in hell and the rest of his life trying to create heaven.
It would take a hard heart to be dismissive of Bride Flight, I found Henry James to be instructive as I watched it:
"Never say you know the last word about any human heart..."]]>13 Assassins: Reviewtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8680132011-05-31T12:23:17-04:002011-07-31T05:12:02-04:00Michael Joneshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-jones/13 Assassins two weeks ago in London. It's playing at the Music Box.
If you have ever faked grunting laconic Japanese phrases while sipping sake at a sushi bar, you must see this movie. If you've ever imagined the feel of a Hattori Hanzo blade in your hand, you must see this movie. If you remember Toshiro Mifune cutting his way out of his traveling box with a sword to face two dozen brigands expecting to intercept a weak provincial governor only to be confronted by the most feared swordsman in Japan, you must see this movie. If the phrase "the most feared swordsman in Japan" sends a thrill up your leg, you must see this movie.
The director, Takashi Miike, famous in Japan for cult films of violence and sex, pays attention to the classic forms of samurai movies: older warriors of fearsome tradecraft imparting wisdom to younger acolytes; the assembling of a team of heroes to live and die with honor; superb costuming; footwork during sword fights rivaling Roger Federer on clay; a lower caste disreputable wannabe becoming one with the true samurai spirit.
13 Assassins follows classical samurai movie symmetry as well: the first half the assembling of a group of samurai to do battle, each with his own story; the second half the battle.
The third half, drinks at Cullen's, reenacting sword thrusts and parries using rolled up Tribunes.
There is little subtlety in samurai movies. Bad guys are really bad. They are awful. Even Mother Theresa, given the chance, would disembowel one with a clean mayoko giri. They travel and fight in packs. Battle scenes are done on a grand scale. In 13 Assassins, the proud and the few take on two hundred retainers, swordsmen, archers, and pike men. They convert an entire village into an abattoir. The arch villain, whose death is the Holy Grail of the movie, makes Muammar Gaddafi seem like Pee Wee Herman rather than an insane brute. The lord's vile crimes are shown to us in graphic sickening detail. By the third reel several in the audience were clamoring to join the thirteen. I, realizing that it was only a movie, did shift my katana to an upright position, between the seats, just in case I was needed.
Of course, samurai movies display great delicacy and beauty as well, think of the fight scene in the snow in Kill Bill. They are filled with stunning visuals whether filmed in black and white or color. 13 Assassins opens with a tranquil scene of men fishing, motionless on chairs high above water, a striking peaceful image before honor compels one of the fishermen to act. Or how the evil lord's minions travel through the forest, seen from above, their round flat hats swaying in unison, their costumes perfect.
And, samurai film directors love using close ups for dramatic emphasis. The screen in 13 Assassins is filled with images of mature men, capable of delicacy and violence, their faces seen in candlelight or half hidden in shadow. Miike shows the audience a samurai looking directly at the camera after a decision is made, his face hardening with purpose and resolve. Then a scene of young samurai, waiting to fulfill their destinies, wanting to be given a chance to fight for honor, to be honorable men, to die if they must.
Their young unlined faces, profoundly different than the older wiser samurai, faces still excited by the prospect of battle, uncertain what it all means, but, determined unto death. One face, with the smooth softness of inexperience, taking on a new character, becoming a samurai before our eyes, responsible, committed.
Miike observes all the forms. He expertly choreographs the mixture of delicacy and violence of a sword fight: the loser, not realizing what has happened at first, pausing in disbelief, frozen for a moment on the screen, before collapsing, usually in a cloud of dust or puddled mud.
He lets the camera linger on the front foot of a samurai, delicately seeking a foothold that can be trusted in a fight, then up to the classic positioning of arm and sword as the technique for the thrust is selected and displayed.
He allows no grey in the black and white of moral positions.
American westerns were a major influence on samurai movies and samurai movies became major influences on American westerns. You can tick off the cultural cross seeding while watching the movie. Certainly Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name would fit comfortably as a fourteenth assassin.
There are also threads running through 13 Assassins that will give pause in a post-WWII and 9/11 world too familiar with how the Code of the Bushido was perverted and how perverse the willingness to commit suicide can be. But, it is a thrilling movie. A good introduction to the Southport crowd of a movie tradition worth exploring through Netflix.
Sword of Doom, Yojimbo, The Samurai Trilogy, and the Zatoichi series would be a great start.
While in London, the day after seeing the movie, I went to the Victoria and Albert Museum for the new wonderful exhibit The Cult of Beauty. Walking out, I came upon a side gallery devoted to Japanese culture that included a display of samurai swords and armor. What story could each blade tell, I thought? One sword was notched by some cruel stroke, perhaps done in battle. When, by whom, why?
I leaned in to the glass to look more closely...I would swear, like in Kill Bill, the ancient katana began to hum. ]]>Atlas Shruggedtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8523562011-04-22T12:14:52-04:002011-07-05T23:43:13-04:00Michael Joneshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-jones/Atlas Shrugged with a shrug and little enthusiasm.
I remembered The Fountainhead vaguely. Mostly I remembered the dense prose, and a sense of what...turgidity, if that is a word? I was prepared to walk out on the slightest pretext; there were a number of other movies to duck into to salvage my nine bucks.
I went early, curious to see what sort of coming attractions had been selected to precede it: Sean of the Hannity? The O'Reilly Syndrome? Ann of a Thousand Coulters?
But, no, just standard previews, albeit promoting movies that would not be released in July or Christmas, as if we would remember.
Then Atlas Shrugged began, I must say, with verve.
A riveting fast-paced montage of all the current crises four years on: oil at $37 a gallon, widespread unemployment, food lines, the Mideast aflame, our country adrift. I was firmly fixed in place by such an opening, interested, not thinking of an escape, intrigued. As minutes went by, a compelling story emerged. Atlas Shrugged feels like an old fashioned movie. A bit clunky. No film-school camera moves or odd angles. Displaying old-fashioned acting chops: more Broderick Crawford than Leonardo de Caprio. Effectively told, it builds slowly into an increasingly interesting story line. Indeed, the movie's reality parallels current events so closely that politics may impact your enjoyment level.
It is a world like our world but just missing reality. As in the central theme of strong men and women whose initiative and industry are thwarted by big government run amok. One would think, with such a plot, the plot would be about altruism and wind power being done in by dastardly captains of industry and overbearing apparatchiks, but one would be wrong. Atlas is a movie about railroads and steel, the ribs and heart of an America past. Its images are rarely reflected positively in popular culture: heavy industry and strong-willed people building big things despite all odds. Threatened with financial and personal ruin but persevering to spite the little minds around them. The bad guys of the movie are powerful competitors who don't want their cozy boats rocked and use political corruption to keep the waters smooth. Bureaucrats whose favorite colors are shades of gray, embracing mediocrity as a way of life.
The major themes of Atlas Shrugged seem familiar from recent press coverage about Ayn Rand's rediscovered books. I'm sure I'll get this all wrong, hers are rather deep waters, but she supports the individual against the herd, rejects the state deciding what people should do or produce or invest in or how they decide to find happiness. Her ideas reject the corruption of the political process, are disgusted by the power of the collective, and admire strength. Her books and this movie celebrate a point of view that seems quaint and politically incorrect in 2011, litigated and regulated into a distant memory.
Against all odds, it might still be there though, indicated by the rise of a new populist political movement, verified by November's elections, demonstrated by the improbable events in Madison. There is a Foxian vibe somewhere too, as you watch the movie. I looked for a Roger Ailes cameo, like Hitchcock getting off a bus in the background, but didn't see one, although I thought I saw Andrew Breitbart at the anniversary party.
If Atlas Shrugged, with its Randian ideas, is successful at the box office with a low budget, no stars, and little promotion, I wonder if it could lead to similar movies? Will we be offered the subtle, subversive, small cries against the system movies like the ones from countries in Eastern Europe during the sixties? Movies that proved that a generation of thought control and overwhelming state power could not completely destroy the human spirit?
The most compelling character in the movie is a strong female lead: the improbably named Dagny Taggart. Always impeccably attired, a little black dress, high heels, and a Reardon steel bracelet even on a construction site. She is highly intelligent, decisive, tough, clear-thinking, strong, strong-willed, beautiful and driven. I sat in the dark and wondered what the thirty something women of my acquaintance would think of her if they saw the movie? Played by Taylor Schilling with style and a steady gaze, she is the Atlas of Atlas Shrugged; carrying the world she wants to build on her shoulders. The rest of the actors seem to be from the Stoic School of Acting with emotions (to use a favorite Parkerism) running the gamut from A to B.
By the end I was thoroughly entertained. My thoughts provoked, the allusions to present day America taken to heart and well alluded to, the political battle lines played out on talk shows all day and every night clearly delineated, and I looked forward to what happens next in Ayn's world.
It could be a surprise hit, as inexplicable to some as Sarah Palin or the persistence of a belief in American exceptionalism. It's a movie that makes you realize that this country was built on more than snips and snails and puppy dog's tails, much less on sugar and spice and everything nice. The movie's celebration of unfashionable ideas of personal responsibility, grit, and hard work may strike a chord. Dagny Taggart might become as popular among young women as Lady Gaga.
You don't feel like cheering at the end of Atlas Shrugged, but you're intrigued by what you have just seen. Maybe there is more to our future than deficits, demoralization, and depression. Could we begin another vibrant American century? Can we help those living in fear under tyrannical regimes? Are we committed to increasing the standard of living for all by encouraging people to be responsible for their own lives? Can we unleash the technical and scientific know-how that has always been our birthright to solve what seem to be the intractable problems of our day? Could we? Can we? Will we?
Ask John Galt.]]>Revisiting Manhattantag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8097322011-01-17T15:45:31-05:002011-05-25T18:25:24-04:00Michael Joneshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-jones/Manhattan again at the Music Box Theater in Chicago for the first time in twenty years.
It was magnificent.
Not as much for the story, which is a little creepy at the fringes: a 17-year-old girl having an affair with a 42-year-old man, but for how the movie expresses the vitality of New York, of America, of the American experience.
It depicts a New York to be missed. Manhattan, triumphantly glowing in the night's sky, magnificent with Gordon Willis's soft black and white cinematography caressing every panoramic view of bridges and buildings as if by a lover, made even more dramatic with the sheer exuberance of George Gershwin's music. Big cars, people wandering past stores clearly selling food made with trans fats, people smoking in bars and restaurants, I sat in the Music Box and ticked off what behaviors have been regulated or made illegal these days, or what would now be subject to citations and fines.
The movie shows a vibrant city on the make, in a country where anything was possible. Thirty years ago, before New York became synonymous with a nanny government presided over by a Mayor who hasn't found a simple pleasure yet that didn't need a bureaucrat's oversight.
Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue the movie's anthem to a city bursting with people striving to achieve the American dream. It is, as has been often noted, Woody Allen's love poem to New York. A Valentine's card to a city and country that gave those who tried, those with talent, those with grit, an escape from the pogroms of Eastern Europe or the slums of the rest of the world. The city that transformed Allen Stewart Konigsberg, son of Nettie and Martin, grandson of Jewish emigrants, into Woody Allen.
The movie follows a group of friends drinking at Elaine's, lovers walking in Central Park, bookstores and apartments, art galleries and concerts, lives being lived in the universe of the second best big city in the world.
As with all great stories, Manhattan tells a story of love and loss, of that maddening roller coaster of having a lover, being a lover, losing a lover. The movie's characters, with humor and pathos, try as we all do, to determine what is real and what is not in our very modern lives.
It's that same old story... what is love, can anyone really love or be loved, can one find that true conjunction of the mind, and, most importantly, will love last?
The universal stuff of Shakespeare, Marvelle, Hemingway, Marquez.
It wasn't a particularly good print and the Music Box's crackly audio made following some of the rapid-fire dialogue difficult, but, even with that, it was on a big movie screen, making me pity those who have only seen Manhattan on television. I had not remembered how daring the 1970's Woody Allen was as a Director: dialogue spoken in complete darkness, the scenes in the Planetarium, the camera tracking a couple falling in love amid the planets and stars.
The sudden cuts from intimate scenes to screen filling vistas of the city, the audacious beauty of Manhattan glowing under the clouds, dazzling us with what a muscular big American city can be.
Then there is Mariel Hemingway.
She reminds of Ingrid Bergman's screen filling close ups in Casablanca. Not when we first see her and hear her querulous voice, but later, as the movie moves on, Mariel becomes one of the screen's great beauties, made breathtaking by her suffering and the innocent purity of her feelings for the frenetic, self-absorbed, twenty-five years older than she, Isaac Davis.
The end of Manhattan is perfect.
Mariel Hemingway is asked by the first man she ever loved, by the man who used her so cruelly even cynically, to stay with him in Manhattan, not to go to London. She, only eighteen, looks at him with absolute love and even kindness. It is a look any man hopes to experience from a woman of spirit once in his life. Older now beyond her years, in the movie's last scene, she will not allow herself to be used again.
I'll be back she tells him. Perhaps, you're right, life will change me, maybe I will change, but it's only for six months. I'll be back. I love you, she tells him...do you love me, she has to ask.
Then:
You have to have a little faith in people...
Screen to black. Gershwin. Manhattan.
]]>Truer Grittag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.8025412010-12-29T23:01:09-05:002011-05-25T18:20:30-04:00Michael Joneshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-jones/
Courtesy of the incredibly talented Coen brothers. Put them on a deserted island with an iPhone and a palm tree and they'd be able to use the video feature to make a South Beach-ian equivalent of Citizen Kane in a week.
I was never that big a fan of the first True Grit. "These days" are a lot like "those days" with a political slant available to illuminate or ruin everything. True Grit's John Wayne had become an extension the Nixon/Vietnam/Kissinger triad. By 1969 he was associated more with the preppy peppy God loving "Up with the People" chorus, white shoed-white belted golfers, and Andy Williams Christmas Specials than anything admirable or heroic.
Long gone was the John Wayne of The Searchers, one of the best American movies ever made. Long gone was the Cavalry Trilogy where he played older men with such a genuine feel that John Ford reportedly remarked "who knew the son of a bitch could act?" Before and after True Grit he played "younger" with increasingly improbable wigs and corsets.
Wayne hadn't made a really good movie since the underrated Donovan's Reef, which I call underrated because no one except me has ever heard of it.
Beyond Wayne and Nixon, most things by the late sixties/early seventies seemed fake, false, and FUBAR-ed. The astronauts and the moon landing were the only things worth believing in. But, young people, then and now, wanted to believe, wanted to believe in something, wanted to believe that there was more to life than the increasing despondency of the Greatest Generation, who, by the late sixties were heavily into two packs a day, three martinis a night, Cold War marriages, and reactionary politics as they watched the old clock click past fifty.
I can remember distinctly when I found something to believe in a movie: McCabe and Mrs. Miller. The only time a man has ever looked good in a fur coat. Starring the two most beautiful actors of their time or any time: Warren Beatty at his peak, Julie Christie, heartbreakingly, at hers. A Robert Altman movie, with natural dialogue spoken as in real life, a very different movie filled with sweat and pain, rain and mud, and an improbable love story. McCabe was a western like no western ever made before. A western that seemed to be true... much more like what it might have been like for a generation raised on cowboys in white hats and blue-eyed Indians. A generation disillusioned by the war and the politics of nattering nabobs of negativism, left adrift in a world that allowed "disco."
In McCabe a horse and rider amble into a new town carved out of a forest. It's snowing, the horse snorts plumes of frozen condensation in the cold air. This is no soundstage snow scene like the Futterman killing in The Searchers. The camera moves down the slushy path and there is a close up of the horse's hoof breaking the newly formed ice in a puddle.
I don't know why that struck me as the truth I was seeking in movies, but it did.
In the first True Grit, the reality of what the west was probably all about, appeared occasionally. John Wayne was promoted as starring in a role "that you've never seen him in before" or some other studio folderol. Indeed, Wayne seemed to relish leaving the ridiculous Colonel Mike Kirby of The Green Berets and the various tough guy at sixty roles he had doing with depressing regularity to play Rooster Cogburn. But, there was, risibly, a bit of Foghorn Leghorn in his portrayal.
The Director's casting ploy to "bring the kids in" (think Fabian in North to Alaska) by casting the Wichita Lineman, Glen Campbell, in a major role basically ruined the movie. It's watchable for Robert Duvall as Lucky Ned Pepper and the showdown in the meadow with Pepper calling John Wayne a "One-Eyed Fat Man," and Rooster yelling back, "fill your hand you sonavabitch."
In an equally troubled time -- unpopular wars, an economy on the brink, mendacity raised to an art form at all levels of society, graphic novel 3-D movies and reality TV shows the popular diversions of a society more despondent than the rapidly disappearing Greatest Generation -- the Coen brothers have made a great American movie in that greatest of American movie genres: the Western.
The truths of True Grit are almost forgotten American values: self-reliance, courage, honor (even among thieves), and grit. I'll explain "grit" to you youngsters: Grit: stick to-itiveness; not giving up; creating your own destiny.
Sgt. Salvatore Giunta, lately awarded the Medal of Honor, hit twice by AK-47 rounds, a third shattering his own rifle, showing American grit by not hunkering down and allowing the Taliban to cart off one of his soldiers. Going after them, killing when he had to, recovering his mortally wounded comrade.
Showing true grit by being flabbergasted that he would be awarded a medal for doing something, which, according to him, every soldier would do, has done, and will do.
In an America cowed into inaction by rules, regulations, trial lawyers, and political correctness, we are reintroduced by the Coens to young Mattie Ross. Her father was brutally murdered and robbed by that murderous scum, Tom Chaney. No one seems prepared to do a thing about it. Mattie Ross, made of sterner stuff than most, takes it upon herself to do seek justice despite her sex and tender age.
She means to hire someone with grit to go into the Indian Territory and, by whatever means necessary, bring that trash back to be hung by the proper authorities. Or, if Tom Chaney resists, to eliminate him with, well, extreme prejudice.
The Coens, by all accounts, have taken Charles Portis' plot and dialogue straight to the screen. They have let their cameras and aesthetic choices tell a great story. They cast talented actors in every role. No Justin Beiber to bring the kids in for them. No cultural icon to play against type as a marketing ploy. They found a remarkable young woman to play Mattie Ross. To paraphrase Cole Younger in The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid: she is a wonderment. And, think about trying to cast someone to play Ned Pepper after watching Robert Duvall be Ned Pepper? If you were the actor cast it would be as intimidating as singing Nessum Dorma knowing that you're not Pavarotti... yet Barry Pepper does it and you don't mind. Matt Damon plays LaBoeuf, the Texas Ranger, in a thankless role that he makes human and almost noble. The scenery plays the scenery, as the Coens know how to film the land.
Jeff Bridges is much better than John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn. Let me say that again: Jeff Bridges is much better than John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn. He isn't Jeff Lebowski playing a U.S. Marshall in some campy send up, or Obadiah Stane projecting back into the 19th Century. He's one of our great actors, given a larger than life role to play, with dialogue Shakespeare would have paid to hear, and, more than anything, he plays grit as if born to it. A truer grit than the previous Rooster.
I'd bet this movie makes millions.
I think America still embraces an ethos of self-reliance, courage under duress, honor, and stick to it-tiveness despite the United States of Me that sometimes seems the water we swim in.
When I walked out of the theater, wonderfully entertained, glad to be alive while the Coens are making movies, and muttering "that's brave talk for a one-eyed fat man" under my breath, I overheard a young girl ask her boyfriend if he liked True Grit.
Darling, he answered, the Rooster abides]]>Black Swan -- A Second Timetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7980272010-12-16T20:54:35-05:002011-05-25T18:20:30-04:00Michael Joneshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-jones/Black Swan again with her ballet teacher of many years.
The first time, seeing it by myself, I made mental notes of what I noticed: a bit of Repulsion, Adrian Lyne-style over the top sexuality, the cold white light of Kubrick, and the difficulty of writing dialogue that isn't risible between judge and judgee in a reality TV world. I walked out thinking about the gap between a professional at anything and everyone else. In ballet you can ask to see a ballerina's hand position and know immediately whether she is the real deal. I was entertained but not moved.
This time, as her teacher reacted, twisting and turning in her seat as she remembered dancing the role of Odette/Odile 60 years ago, we both, as in Pauline Kael's wonderful phrase, lost it at the movies.
It was a completely different experience. Black Swan became a movie about how art is created and the madness of genius. The score, as you can imagine, is one of the best in memory. Seeing it a second time convinced me that it is one of the movies of the year. This time the movie pulled me into the fable of the swans, into the lives of the dance company, into experiencing vicariously the effort required to stage an opening night of Swan Lake.
The director is not merely filming the performance of a ballet company, instead he uses Natalie Portman as the focus of our attention. A third of the movie seems to be her face in close-up. She is classically beautiful, drawn to all bone and taut skin for this role -- riveting. She is so open to expression that she holds our attention -- whether as a still lake ruffled by slight wind of emotion, letting us see her fragility, or as an ocean's surface as the hurricane of her desire and drive for perfection blows through.
The plot follows the company from casting to the opening night of a new version of Swan Lake, a version that is as much Odile as Odette. Portman, as Odette, resembles a young Audrey Hepburn, as Odile she must allow a darker version of herself to live. She is convincing as a fragile ingenue and a driven termagant.
The director makes it clear that ballet at this level requires a perfection that is almost inhuman, and, among all things, he shows how Portman's character lives to be perfect.
At either showing I was not a neutral observer. My daughter is a ballerina, and I am aware of the effort behind each of her performances. Each dancer you see on stage, even in the most humble companies, has experienced years of discipline, practice, and luck to have made it so far. It is a demanding art form, not for the weak in body or spirit.
Black Swan takes us into the world of ballet with all its split toenails, endless hours at the barre, the fierce competition among a hundred dancers to be the one... the prima ballerina.
The movie brings the consensual hallucination that beautiful young dancers are actually swans to other parts of the film in a way that can disturb. What indeed is real, and what is not, in a ballet performance? The sweat and effort, the hour upon hour of rehearsal, the rivalries and bullying to bring out the best in the principle dancers? Or is ballet's reality what we the audience see when the curtain goes up and the ballet begins?
Young girls get toe shoes in a first coming of age at ten, and immediately teeter on weak ankles, dreaming of being the Swan Queen. They dream and practice and dance and are introduced to the most beautiful music in the world as they follow in the literal footsteps of generations of other women. My daughter's wonderful teacher sitting next to me in the dark, critical of the the things any professional would notice, was in tears at moments in the movie I could only guess at.
Natalie Portman's Nina Sayers is wound so tightly by the ambition to be perfect that being the lead seems her only path to happiness. She discovers that she is to be the Swan Queen in a scene that would pull a stone's heartstrings. The screen fills with her face in close up, she calls her mother to tell her the incredible news, and she begins to sob with happiness. For a moment the distance from actress to audience vanishes and we live her, the audience in the movie theater, with a catch in its throat.
A profound moment found in all the best movies. Perhaps, the 'why' of why we go to movies. A why which is, to me, as the 'why' of why some things are beautiful and some are not.
At opening night, as the familiar overture to Swan Lake begins, we sit expectant, the curtain rises. The quest for perfection becomes perfection. The ballet, viewed from the wings with the performers nervously waiting to hear their cues, becomes the ideal distance to feel what it must be like to be in a company. The extraordinary experience of watching Natalie/Nina/Odette/Odile is a movie to talk about with friends over drinks, to see more than once, to write about in an attempt to make the reader see the Black Swan.
The end of the ballet begins: Tchaikovsky fills the theater, the huge screen beckons with its out sized magic, the swans and dancers are one, Nina Sayers is Odette and Odile, and, yes, I've lost it at the movies yet again.]]>